Honest, personal, confessional, non-hagiographic, it suggests that nine years after his death, we’re ready to start picking through the glory and tragedy, pride and horror, magic and deep sadness all bundled into the public readings and response to this extraordinary artist.

In Frieze magazine, Sonya Dyer writes of the empathy, disgust and “profound feeling of sadness” that arose after gorging on Jackson’s “Stranger in Moscow” (1996) video which presents the artist as “a portrait of despair, a plaintive victim at his most forlorn – the promise of death (or worse, the lifelong agony of the unfairly persecuted) looms around every corner.”

Visitors pose for a picture next to an artwork entitled The King of Pop (C) by US artist Mark Ryden, on display during a photocall to promote the exhibition: ‘Michael Jackson: On The Wall’. Photo: Getty

The beautiful child with the precocious talent chiselling, bleaching and erasing himself as his fame ascended to the point, already in 1991 where “it was as if the schizophrenic, self-hating, hypocritical and violent history of race in America has incarnated itself in a single man.”

‘Pale and male’

This week, the National Portrait Gallery invited a handful of newspaper critics for a pre-preview snoop. (Seldom has this wing of the British art establishment looked quite so uniformly pale and male – in itself an indication of the broader context of an NPG show dedicated to an African-American celebrity, featuring a significant proportion of works by prominent artists of colour).

Jackson – his work, life and legacy – provides abundant material for exploration. While undoubtedly a crowd-pleaser, an exhibition addressing Jackson as a global cultural phenomenon shouldn’t be an artistic compromise. There is ground for staging a witty, affectionate and intelligent exhibition that does not shy from engagement with darkness and apparent contradictions.

David LaChapelle’s An Illuminating Path, 1998, on display at a press preview of Michael Jackson: On the Wall exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Photo: PA Wire

Installation was still under way, so I may not have had the full crystal gloved experience, but Michael Jackson: On The Wall is not that exhibition.

Dedicated to artworks inspired by Jackson, the show seems thin and overstretched. There are works – among them a Maggi Hambling portrait that looks like someone skidded in cake icing, and another by Mr. Brainwash, the hype “artist” featured in Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop – here, apparently, on no other merit other than their inclusion of Jackson’s image.

Act of erasure

The show is best where less literal.

David Hammons’s “Which Mike do you want to be like?” (2001) offers a trio of microphones arranged at heights for Michaels Jackson, Tyson and Jordan, suggesting the limited archetypes of success available to young African American men. In Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s “P.Y.T.” (2009) a pair of penny loafers is suspended on their tips by helium balloons – an allusion to Jackson’s apparent ability to defy gravity.

A gallery assistant poses next to an artwork entitled Equestrian Portrait of King Phillip II (Michael Jackson) by US artist Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Getty

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s “As We See You: Dreams of Jand” (2017) suggests the permeation of Jackson into Nigerian music culture, and the presence, at one remove, of his image and music in places otherwise relatively cut off from American culture.

These are highlights in a show that otherwise seems to perform its own act of erasure. While Jackson’s later bone-white, skeletal face gazes from one or two of the works here, the show overall lacks the passionate, troubled and nuanced engagement found in the discourse taking place elsewhere.

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